“Congress of Freaks,” with brothers George and Willie Muse at bottom right.

“Congress of Freaks,” with brothers George and Willie Muse at bottom right.

Photo: Circus World Museum

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Beth Macy

Beth Macy

Photo: Little, Brown

‘Truevine,’ by Beth Macy

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A hundred years ago, a small carnival sideshow added two new cast members. George and Willie Muse, brothers from Virginia, were variously billed as “Ecuadorian Savages,” emigrants from Madagascar, and “Darwin’s Missing Links.” Later, they were “Eko and Iko, Ambassadors from Mars.”

“The truth was considerably less colorful. And more cruel,” Beth Macy writes in her extraordinary new book, “Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South.”

“Heralded as ‘nature’s greatest mistakes,’” Macy writes, “George and Willie were modern-day slaves, hidden in plain sight, at a time when naive and eager audiences didn’t think to ask questions about contracts or working conditions, and civil rights didn’t much exist for children, women, or blacks.”

The Muses were African Americans born with albinism. They had pale skin, blue eyes and light-colored hair. They didn’t look like their siblings, or most of the other black residents of Truevine, Va. In an era when “freak shows” were common, they were gawked at, lied to, stolen from and misrepresented. Their act required them to “play dumb,” Macy says, but they weren’t.

“Truevine” is at once poignant and rigorous, a compassionate dual biography and a forthright examination of codified racism. Macy is a resourceful reporter and a strong but never showy writer. She worked for a newspaper in Virginia when she first interviewed members of the Muse family 15 years ago. This book, her second after “Factory Man,” is the work of a journalist whose persistence, empathy and commitment to accuracy can’t be doubted.

How did George and Willie Muse end up in a sideshow? The “kidnapping” in Macy’s subtitle refers to the belief that around the turn of the 20th century, a carnival promoter abducted George and Willie, who were quite young at the time. This is the version of events that’s been passed down by those who knew the Muses. It may well have happened this way.

But Macy’s extensive research — she unearthed news reports and legal documents not seen in many years — suggests another possibility: Harriett, the boys’ mother, might have “temporarily let them go, presumably for pay,” believing that they’d soon be brought back home. When they weren’t, she found a lawyer and fought for their return.

Considering the many hardships Harriett Muse was forced to endure a few decades after the Civil War, Macy cautions those who’d criticize her decisions: “Who is anyone to judge the pressures facing an illiterate washerwoman raising five children alone in rural Virginia during the harshest years of Jim Crow?”

However they came to it, carnival work would shape the Muse brothers’ lives. They started appearing in press reports in the mid-1910s, when Willie and George, who was about three years older, were in their teens or early 20s (their birth dates vary depending upon the source). Racist ringmasters would tell crowds that the Muses were “Monkey Men” or “Sheep-Headed Men.”

The Muses were far brighter than they were allowed to demonstrate. Film footage shot in the 1920s, Macy says, shows the brothers chatting “cheerfully” with co-workers: “They do not appear to be mentally encumbered, incapacitated, or slow.”

In the years ahead, they traveled the country with small carnivals and big circuses. They learned to play stringed instruments and were seen “by millions of people from Hawaii to the Hudson Valley of New York,” Macy writes.

In 1927, Harriett Muse learned that her sons would be performing in Virginia. Years had “passed without word of their health or whereabouts,” Macy writes, and she was determined to see them. Harriett attended the show and refused to “leave the fairgrounds … unless George and Willie accompan(ied) her home.”

At a time when African Americans were systematically denied a voice in the justice system, Harriett hired a lawyer and sued the circus. A settlement seems to have provided the family with at least some of the money that various carnival promoters had pilfered from the brothers.

“It was George and Willie’s decision to … rejoin the circus in the spring of 1928,” Macy writes. The family needed a regular income, and after a spell in small-town Virginia, the brothers “probably also missed the relative freedom of the circus backyard.” They took some pride in their profession, too.

“They may have been laughing at us,” Willie said, according to family members, “but backstage, we were laughing at them because they were paying to see us.” The brothers performed into the 1950s.

Some works of history are willfully oblivious to the modern world. Not this one. Macy acknowledges the terrible news that echoed in the background as she conducted her research: “It was the spring of 2015, the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War. And yet racial wounds seemed to be growing by the day: police shootings of unarmed black men occurred in so many cities, it was hard to feel one had been mourned before another happened.”

Macy interjects in this way just a handful of times, choosing her spots and mostly letting the Muse brothers’ story speak for itself. The overall effect is extremely powerful. “Truevine” may focus on events that began a century ago, but its guiding spirit couldn’t be more urgent.

Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

Truevine

Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother’s Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South

By Beth Macy

(Little, Brown;

432 pages; $28)

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